Friday, December 20, 2013

Well, as if it would be his to decide. The gubernatorial election to be called early next year in Tokyo is a local election, albeit an important one if only because Tokyo is the most populous prefecture in Japan.

In case you haven't heard about it, Tokyo Governor Naoki Inose, who won the election in December last year with a landslide (he amassed the largest ever number of votes in the Tokyo gubernatorial election) and won the 2020 Olympic for Tokyo, suddenly found himself a target of the suddenly righteous press in Japan (who have all but stopped coverage of the State Secrecy Protection Law as soon as it passed the Upper House), and has been forced out of office.

Mr. Inose's sin? Having received a "huge", no-interest campaign loan (50 million yen, or 500,000 US dollars) from a hospital chain that provided campaign funds to a host of other national politicians, many of them in Liberal Democratic Party in the December 2012 Lower House election/local elections.

Mr. Inose did an extremely poor job of explaining away (he miserably failed), and for that small amount, as far as the politics go in Japan and which he claims he has returned, he resigned on December 19, 2013.

Is the righteous mainstream (national) media in Japan going after the national politicians in the ruling party?

Nope.

It's not that I think highly of Mr. Inose (I don't), but the way the mainstream media (particularly Asahi, who had a "scoop" - sure, sure) and LDP blew it out of proportion from a potential bribery case into a circus is highly suspicious. Now that Mr. Inose has resigned, all is well, the case closed, not just for Inose but most likely for any politician who received money from the hospital chain.

Mr. Inose's word says it all: "I was a politically naive amateur."

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, on December 18 even before Governor Inose announced he would resign, was quoted as saying this on TV Tokyo:

自民党関係者によりますと、安倍総理は都知事候補について若い女性がいい」と周辺に話していたということです。

According to the source connected to LDP, Prime Minister Abe was telling his staff that the candidate for the Governor of Tokyo should be a young woman.

Young woman. Meaning someone (or a whole lot of them) like these, Abe's favorite, dressed in a school-uniform-like outfit (you are supposed to see them as high school girls)?

(My sincere condolence to the ASEAN ministers and their spouses who were subjected to this "entertainment" by PM Abe. If you were thinking about teaming up with Abe's Japan to counter the pressure from China, good luck.)

Oh by the way, the "candidates" (unofficial, undeclared for now) picked by a TV program (Asahi, I think) are beyond the pale for most Japanese net citizens:

Candidates with yellow background color are from the opposition, blue from LDP. They don't even look human, but four out of seven are girls. Not sure about "young".

Abe wants the Japanese version of Miley Cyrus, not Palin or Bachman or anyone over 40 if not 30. Less naughty perhaps.

50 million yen, or 500,000 USD, is probably enough to buy a "mansion" (high-rise apartment unit) in Tokyo, probably not the central Tokyo but close enough. That's not much, but that could just be me, born and grown up in Tokyo.

As far as the political world in Japan goes, people start to raise eyebrows when the amount exceeds 100 million yen, or "ichi-oku en".

True, Ozawa got into trouble because of a few hundred million but still 50 ml is no pocket change.Some other politician got in trouble for "foreign" donations... turned out he got 200.000/300.000 yen from a third generation Japanese-Korean old lady (if I recall correctly). I would call this donation irrelevant, but 50 ml is another story.

Let's put it this way, those girls on stage are looking rather the much more attractive than America's newest candidate for president. The one referred to as "this thing", Pajama Boi, FlannelJammies, etc.

The Genius of It All, LOL,"Unlike your average Jehovah’s Witness, Pajama Boy has evidently managed not only to get into the warmth of your house to do his proselytizing, but to make himself a cup of hot chocolate and to get into his bedtime clothes to boot. That is to say, Pajama Boy is staying over — priggish facial expression and all — and he won’t leave until you’ve relented." LOL

About my coverage of Japan Earthquake of March 11

I am Japanese, and I not only read Japanese news sources for information on earthquake and the Fukushima Nuke Plant but also watch press conferences via the Internet when I can and summarize my findings, adding my observations.

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Well, this was, until March 11, 2011. Now it is taken over by the events in Japan, first earthquake and tsunami but quickly by the nuke reactor accident. It continues to be a one-person (me) blog, and I haven't even managed to update the sidebars after 5 months... Thanks for coming, spread the word.------------------This is an aggregator site of blogs coming out of SKF (double-short financials ETF) message board at Yahoo.

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